Generally the invention relates to a method and a system enabling third party charge at the use of a terminal or a telephone in a telecommunication network.
More particularly, the subject invention relates to a method and a system enabling a subscriber with a radio terminal to use another terminal or telephone, which does not belong to his radio terminal subscription.
An example of such a subscriber is a telephone subscriber, who has a mobile telephone, and at the same time is a subscriber in a fixed telecommunication network and wishes to charge the last mentioned subscription for the use of another telephone in the network, which does nor belong to this subscription, e.g. a coin box.
A mobile telephone subscriber has normally a subscription also in the wirebound telephone network. If a wirebound telephone is available at the location where the subscriber is located, the subscriber may prefer to use this wirebound telephone instead of his mobile telephone due to the lower cost for the call and the higher speech quality or just to save the batteries of the mobile telephone. For the subscriber it is then desirable to enable the call to be charged to the wirebound subscription.
The procedure in today's existing networks for charging a third terminal, or third party charge, is carried out manually by an operator, involving extra costs and time, which implies that the function has little interest in the described situation.
The manual procedure in Sweden for these Sweden so-called Bt-calls which should be charged to a third party is as follows.
Call an operator on 0018, ask for a Bt-call and state:
the telephone number from which you wish to call, PA1 the requested startup time for the call PA1 the subscription which should be charged.
The operator calls the number intended for charging to get a confirmation that the charge will be accepted. The operator calls the terminal, from which the call is to be made, at the requested time and following this the called subscriber number can be entered.